I chose to do my second exercise paper on “living on the outskirts of poverty: A balanced budget”. I am getting married this year and my fiancé and I have begun to start a tight budget for ourselves, so this assignment hit really close to home. Together we will make about the same as the couple in the example. If a couple was making roughly 18,924 a year, $1,577 a month, it would make it hard to live and enjoy life. I asked a lot of different people for their estimates on how much they pay for certain things, as well as looked up online for different examples and estimates.
My results where that for a two bedroom apartment in Bellbrook Ohio it would cost about $600.00 a month with water, sewage, and trash all included. Electric would cost the family an additional $125.00 every month. For two pre owned paid off cars, insurance would run them approximately $150.00 a month, and with gas prices up to about $4.00 a gallon, if work and shopping was all within fifteen minutes of them I estimated it would cost them about $384.00 a month. For Childcare for the preschooler, and afterschool care for the seven year old it would be about $544.00 a month. Healthcare would run about $1,400.00 for the entire family for a month. For Food, Clothing, extra’s, and entertainment it is roughly $880.00 a month. All this added up is approximently$4,008 a month an astonishing $48,096 a year. This is over two times the amount that the family makes together in a year.
With all this cost of living they have to make some drastic cuts. For example if they had a family member watch the children instead of having them in day care it would cut out $500.00 of their expenses every month. They could cut down their entertainment to once a month and take it down t...
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... functionalist this family serves a purpose for being at almost the poverty line. Everything in society has a purpose and a function. Poverty and inequality serve a specific function in society. Inequality is a graded ladder of people at different income levels. Poverty motivates people to “climb the ladder”. Poverty then ensures that all jobs (functions) in society will be filled. So even though it is sad that this family will struggle through life and will most likely be sick and stressed more than the average family, it is a necessary thing. Their status helps make everything balanced and in order.
Works Cited
"Sociology: Causes and Effects of Poverty - CliffsNotes." Get Homework Help with CliffsNotes Study Guides - CliffsNotes. Web. 02 June 2011. .
Student Answer: The Garners’ recreation and entertainment cash outflow seems to be excessive. They are paying almost as much in entertainment that they are paying towards their home mortgage. I would suggest they cut those costs dramatically to $200. I would also suggest they decrease their clothing allowance to $100. They should also eliminate the gifts and donations in their budget because they are paying minimum payments on credit cards, and eliminating
The book deals with several sociological issues. It focuses on poverty, as well as s...
Many that live in poverty often overspend. People are often faced with many challenges that force them into poverty, which often is out of their control. A person that lives in poverty, has the ability to take hold of their lives and go on to become productive, is inspiring to me as a student of the social work cohort. Striving to become a social worker and reading this book allowed me the insight of the different people that I encounter on a daily basis. As a social worker, I will come in touch with a variety of people that live in poverty, as well as some that do not.
I believe that my opinion on these families falls into the Symbolic-Interaction theory. My immediate thought is to blame the victims of poverty and I dislike that I think like that. I know that my opinion could be completely different if I knew more of their backgrounds and how they got to where they were, but most of society holds a lot of value in first impressions. I also think that economic inequality is completely unfortunate. Seeing that the highest 20 percent of U.S. families earns about 48.9 percent of all income is confusing and feels unfair. It is really hard knowing that so many children can starve and go without, while another family is spending thousands on an outfit, but that is our disheartening reality.
University, T. T. (2011). Deprivation and it's Discontents. Retrieved October 24, 2011, from indianapublicmedia.org: http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/deprivation-discontents/
In recent years, the number of children whose families fall under the line of poverty has risen at an alarming rate. Crosson-Tower (2013) postulated a reason for this increase when she said, “The recent weakening economy, a higher unemployment rate, unprecedented numbers of home foreclosures and a decline in the safety net for children and their families have resulted in a gradual continuing increase in children living in extreme poverty” (p. 57). Apparently, nearly every aspect of the United States’ crumbling economy affects a family’s ability to meet basic needs. The rise in single parent, mother headed families has not helped poverty statistics because of the lower earning potential of women. A major reason so many children liv...
As stated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the test of our progression is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Many people may agree with this statement considering that the United States is such a wealthy country and in 2012, 46.5 million people were living in poverty in the United States and 15% of all Americans and 21.8% of children under age eighteen were in poverty.The honest truth is that many people do not know the conditions this group of people must live in on a daily basis because of the small number of people who realize the struggle there is not a great amount of service. In the article Too stressed for Success, the author Kevin Clarke asks the question “What is the cost of being poor in America?” and follows the question by explaining the great deals of problems the community of poverty goes through daily by saying, “Researchers have long known that because of a broad reduction in retail and other consumer choices experienced by America's poor, it is often simply more expensive to be poor in the United States.
People living in poverty can be thought of as a “them” who can be easily ignored and forgotten; when, in reality, poverty can affect anyone. When people are living in poverty, sometimes it is not their fault. Often, unfortunate events that are out of someone’s control can set them up for failure. For example, the poverty rate for disabled adults from the age of 18-64 is 28.5%, while disabled 18-64 year olds only make up 7.7% of America’s population (Proctor, Semega, and Kollar 16). Therefore, poverty disproportionately affects disabled adults. The stories of those living in poverty are incredibly diverse, as Sasha Abramsky points out in The American Way of Poverty:
I currently live in a big household with my father, mother, roommate, and seven siblings. This household gains low-income and is hard to deal through the struggles. There are several issues that were hard to manage such as not being able to afford personal items for me and my siblings. We were not economically sufficient since we had utilities bills and medical bills to pay. All the medical bills includes the surgery for my sister that was born with a cleft plate, surgery for my mother tumor that had to be removed, and my dad therapy for his back pain since he works extremely hard in construction and always comes home in aching pain. Also, all my siblings have asthma and are constantly in the emergency room do to sudden asthma attacks. We have to pay for the asthma treatment for everyone of them.
Moreover, with only having the ability to work on small odd jobs, or low paying careers, around his or her local area, is not enough to help a family to obtain the necessities that are needed for a strong healthy environment. Jo Goodwin Parker shows this in her piece "What is Poverty?" as she states "I pay twenty dollars a month rent, and most of the rest goes for food.... I try my best to use only the minimum electricity. If I use more, there is that much less for food" (Parker 406). With most Americans, they take what they have for granted, like the ability to have running water at their finger tips. For those in poverty; however, they have to focus all mostly everything just not to see his or her children starve when dinner is not on the table that night. Additionally, with the inability to afford transportation, health care is very hard to secure in houses that are trapped in poverty. To demonstrate, when looking at Parker 's story again, after talking about how she cannot send her children to school due to their diseases, she states that" yes, there are health clinics and they are in the towns.... I can walk that far (even if it is sixteen miles both way, but can my little children?" (Parker 406). Also, due to the lack of transportation, parents are unable to travel out further in the search of work in the
The pathology model, known as the culture of poverty, claims that poverty is attributed to the personal failings of the individual, family or community. It is perceived that this failings stem from a combination of dysfunctional behaviors, attitudes, and values that make and keep poor people poor. With the structural economic model, it is believed that proponents of poverty as a structural problem trace its roots to dysfunctional aspects of the economic system. These claims place more responsibility on the failure of the government to address fundamental economic patterns that have forced people into poverty and not provided a means out. They also reflect the idea that what are often considered to be characteristics of a culture of poverty are actually characteristics of poverty itself, having nothing to so with the attitudes, values, and life choices od those forced to live in poverty. (Guest, 422-423)
...nt of $764 and a staggering 43% cannot afford to purchase an average priced home ($140,422). With that being said, over 8,000 families are on waiting lists for subsidized and affordable housing. Many things can prevent someone from housing such as poor credit histories, unresolved debts, and criminal backgrounds. Without affordable child care or dependable transportation, families have a greater challenge of moving towards autonomy.
taxpayers about $51,000 per a year to house, feed, clothe, and provide healthcare for each
...my. Families now have to pay for the clothes of 2 children, the food for 2 children, the education for 2 children, and the costs just increase more and more.
Poverty not only prevents people from buying the things they need, it is about stress, poor health, sub-standard housing, lack of facilities, inadequate infrastructure, fear of crime, and problems associated with the stigma of living in a deprived area (Tomlinson & Walker, 2009).